“I try to be a Christian. [But] I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.” In fact, prayer was almost as uncomfortable subject for Welles as the birds and the bees. He told the French New Wave magazine Cahiers du Cinema , “In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.”

I can never talk about film for long without adverting to Welles, the greatest director this country has produced to date. To watch Citizen Kane with even the most attenuated artistic sensitivity is to

ensure that you will see every film thereafter with new eyes.

But many laud his patchwork Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight , as a close second in brilliance. In the CT piece, Welles says of the tragicomic knight:

“If Shakespeare had done nothing but that magnificent creation, it would suffice to make him immortal.”

A Playboy magazine interviewer mentioned to Welles that poet W.H. Auden called Falstaff a “Christ figure,” to which Welles agrees, but clarifies: “I think Falstaff is like a Christmas tree decorated with vices. The tree itself is total innocence and love.”

In an interview with director Peter Bogdanovich, Welles expounded on his almost sacramental construal of Falstaff:

I think he’s one of the only great characters in all dramatic literature who is essentially good. He’s good in the sense that the hippies are good . The comedy is all about the gross faults in the man, but those faults are so trivial: his famous cowardice is a joke—a joke Falstaff seems to be telling himself against himself . . . But his goodness is basic—like bread and wine.

Oklahoma’s Legislature has voted unanimously to outlaw all human cloning from the state, and prohibit the importation of the product of human cloning. From the story

:

Legislation to ban human cloning easily cleared both the House and the Senate on Friday and heads to the governor. House Bill 1114 would make it illegal “for any person or entity, public or private, to perform or attempt to perform human cloning; participate in an attempt to perform human cloning; ship, transfer, or receive the product of human cloning for any purpose; and import the product of human cloning for any purpose.”

Knowing that the devil is in the details, I looked up the bill ( H.B. 1114 ), and here is how human cloning is defined:

“Human cloning” means human asexual reproduction, accomplished by introducing the nuclear material of a human somatic cell into a fertilized or unfertilized oocyte whose nucleus has been removed or inactivated to produce a living organism (at any stage of development) with a human genetic constitution.

Good. This is the first true human cloning ban to pass in a long time. Unless the governor vetoes the bill and that veto is upheld, it looks like Oklahoma has pushed back against brave new world.

Over at Credo Taylor Marshall does the good service of informing us that the Enlightened One has offered his first tithe to the all-knowing Demiurge in his recent reversal of the "Mexico City" policy that "banned the use of Federal funds to overseas organizations that perform abortions."

To Barry’s credit he never hid the fact that he was pro-abortion and I got the feeling that he was rather proud of his position regarding the slaughter of the innocents. How far the pro-abortion folks, ably led by our profound and gifted leader, expand the American abattoir remains to be seen but I’m thinking for children now or soon to be residing in the womb "it’s a hard rain’s a gonna-fall."

Which leads to the question of the day: Given the erudition displayed by numerous commentators, I’d like to ask those who are both Democrats and Christians (i.e. those who actually worship the Jewish carpenter) how it is that you cast your ballot for Obama and the Democrats given their pro-abortion policy?

So far, I’ve been reluctant to enter the torture debate. That’s not because it isn’t important (it is) or because I’m unsure of my views (I oppose torture). Rather, this issue has encouraged the tendency of the blogosphere to generate more heat than light. The public discourse doesn’t benefit much from the polemics of bloggers who, on the whole, lack specific knowledge of interrogation practices at Guatananmo and elsewhere, or of the legal principles involved.

Be that as it may, that technique was used three times, the last being in 2003, and was banned internally by the Bush administration in 2006. So, even if you think waterboarding is unquestionably torture, then the "end of torture" came in 2003, or at the latest 2006.

The author, one Michael Anton, goes on to argue that the President recent executive ordering limiting interrogations to military standards therefore can’t be described as banning torture. He asks,

So what other practices does Obama’s Executive Order end? According to the article, "temperature manipulation and stress positions," as well as "trick[ing] prisoners into believing they would face physical harm from foreign intelligence services if they didn’t cooperate." Maybe these are very terrible things. But are they "torture" either under US law or in any reasonable person’s definition?

It’s hard to judge whether Anton is really as ignorant as he would like to appear. Because there is no question that the methods are torture. One reason is that the US has signed international conventions prohibiting them, and treaties are, as every high-school student ought to know, the law of the land. Another is that they are explicitly identified as such in various military manuals on interrogation. For purposes of criminal prosecution, incidentally, there’s no distinction between torture and less dramatic violence. Coerced statements are inadmissible, period, in a court of law.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask Susan J. Crawford, the chief judge of the military tribunals at Guatanamo, who explicitly identified the "sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold" to which Mohammed al-Qahtani was subjected as torture. The opinion of a "reasonable person" is legally irrelevant. It will now be impossible to try the alleged 20th hijacker.

It’s true that al-Qahtani was interrogated in 2002, and that the torture techniques used on him were later banned. But if you’re inclined to wonder, like Anton, why "America’s reputation has suffered or that so many Americans believe the worst of their own government", you might begin with the fact that the public was lied to for years about what was being done in its name and, ostensibly, in its defense.

It would be nice to think that Obama’s executive order only formalized prohibitions that were already in place. But it’s just such disingenuous defences of what the Gestapo called verschaerfte Vernehmung that show why it was necessary.

Mr. Deneen’s take (post just before this one) on the Inaugural is the most penetrating I’ve seen, or expect to see. The collusion between Kantianism and Machiavellianism is a very important insight, and in fact one that Harvey Mansfield has always seen very clearly (as in his "Moral Reasoning 13" class at Harvard in the 80s - and beyond? - you gotta love the numbering). One way (Mansfield’s?) of responding to this collusion in whose grip we find ourselves (if we ever find ourselves) would be to look for virtue, to assert virtue in the practical space that opens between these alien allies. Both Machiavellianism and Kantianism suppress the question of purpose, and thus suppress the soul, but the soul… happens. Mansfield has thus sought to affirm America’s Constitutional Soul (Johns Hopkins). In this strategy, as far as I understand it, constitutionalism itself functions as a kind of virtue that does not merely serve but that shapes and limits our desires. Thus, when Obama gives rein to a certain spiritedness in affirming the American way of life against its enemies, it is possible to sense in this affirmation something more than pure confinement within the modern project.

So such affirmations (we will not apologize) were parts of the speech that I warmed up to. It seems to me that such rhetoric (especially when coupled with the very striking: “these things are old , these things are true ) implicitly affirms a certain particularity of our national existence that cannot be reduced to the Machiavellian-Kantian project. To be sure, Mansfield has been very discreet, perhaps too discreet, concerning the connection between this elevated view of the constitution and other things that Americans have looked up to (like God, just to take an example). In this he may be described as pursuing a kind of Tocquevillean strategy, one that lets Americans keep their philosophy of enlightened materialism (“self-interest well understood”) while encouraging institutions and practices that cannot be explained by that philosophy. This contrasts of course with Patrick’s recommended “real change” towards the “inculcation of virtue.” And Patrick may be right; it may be that the Tocquevillean moment has passed, and that there is no way to stop, slow down, or even inflect our hurtling Machiavellian-Kantian progress without publicly and explicitly affirming the priority of virtue to freedom. I’m inclined to believe that our rapid progress towards the abolition of marriage, for example, might well be enough to make Tocqueville himself take another view of democratic Providence. But just how to be a post-Tocquevillean (and in that sense postmodern) constitutionalist – now there’s a tough one.

A few days ago I saw the new Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino which is ably reviewed by our own Peter Suderman here . Lots of critics have charged the movie, and Eastwood’s directorial efforts generally, with a kind of bleak nihilism that finds hope only in the heroic but feckless struggle against the meaninglessness of life. Whether that holds true for Eastwood’s previous movies is a matter for another post (and another blogger) but with respect to Gran Torino it seems to miss the mark.

The primary struggle in the movie is between tradition and culture, on the one hand, and the rootlessness often promoted by American liberalism, on the other. Eastwood’s character, Walt, finds himself completely dislocated, living in a neighborhood suddenly unrecognizable to him, populated with people that are not only strangers to him but culturally unfamiliar. He is largely estranged from his family— his sons are depicted as basically decent people but Walt is clearly incapable of connecting to them, partly because of his own austere traditionalism and his sons’ embracing of modernity and partly because of the emotional toll war took on him. Traditional culture is never given an unambiguous three cheers in the movie—one disadvantage of taking seriously the particularity of cultures and their competing claims to embodying the truth is that different cultures inevitably clash; Walt benefited from a tradition that provided him with a cetain work ethic and moral compass but it also debilitated him.

The central point of comparision in the movie is between his grandkids and the the two sets of young Asian teenagers who live in his deteriorating neighborhood. His own grandkids are depicted somewhat heavy-handedly—they are incapable of respect for others, reject Walt as an ancient relic, and seem lost in the fashionable, technology driven consumerism that dominates the day. In a sense, they’re a much softer, more banal version of the gangster teens who terrorize Walt’s neighborhood—also rootless and directionless, also driven by the most crass of desires, also living a kind of self-encapsulated nihilistic nightmare. In their case, however, deprived of the comforts that come with material success, their nihilism is often of a brutal and violent variety.

The third set of teens, also Asians, are caught somewhere between their very traditional culture and the liberalism that tolerates its exercise but also encourages the conditions that prove inhospitable to its flourishing. Walt befriends two of them despite the awkwardness created by the strangeness of the culture in is eyes. They are both more modern and more Amercanized than their parents but respect the tradition their parents impart; they seem able to weather the tumult and danger of their neighborhood only because of the moral grounding it provides. They are the central protagonists of the movie, even more so than Walt, precisely because their lives are exemplars of the struggle between their inherited tradition the reflexive iconoclasm of modernity.

One interesting proposition the movie seems to endorse is that there’s a way in which modern liberalism can save itself through its own tolerance and prosperity—as long as we continue to attract more tradition bearing immigrants to our country with the allure of economic opportunity we can counterbalance our own rootless tendencies. This is an imperfect solution, of course, and the movie suggests that this merely postpones the issue to the next generation who face the perils of our cultural cynicism all over again. Nevertheless, Gran Torino manages to capture a central paradox of American life: its openness to cultural diversity and its general dismissal of the importance of culture.

2) It doesn’t even mean the probability that something and something else are correlated.

Things can be correlated in all kinds of ways. The r-squared value only measures (in a weird way that we’ll discuss soon) the probability that two things are linearly correlated. Once upon a time, physicists wrought havoc upon the sciences by writing papers claiming all kinds of correlations that didn’t actually exist. It’s rather easy to ascribe correlations to things that are not, in fact, correlated. Don’t succumb to that temptation.

3) It doesn’t even mean the probability that something and something else are linearly correlated.

Statistics can’t actually tell you the probability of something being the case without additional assumptions. The oft-abused p-values are not, as most people interpret them, equivalent to one minus the probability that a given relationship exists. Rather, they are the probability that assuming nothing but chance is at work, the given situation might be observed. This common misconception naturally extends to r-squared numbers: just consider Anscombe’s quartet .

So what on earth does it mean?

In as few words as possible, the r-squared value represents the fraction of the variability in a data-set that can be accounted for by the statistical model (in a drearily frequentist way). As for what that actually means , statisticians aren’t really able to come to any agreement. Welcome to the wonderful world of Damned Lies .

Over coffee this morning, I found that Razib Khan and Ross Douthat have started a lively little debate about the use and abuse of the term "Judeo-Christian". Khan argues that it’s little more than political correctness. In fact, the dominant form of Judaism between about 500 and 1800 AD was closer to Islam than Christianity. Douthat counters that "the Christian decision to swallow the Hebrew Bible whole into its scripture - and to preserve, rather than elide, Jesus’ own obvious self-understanding as a Jew - ultimately creates deeper grounds for dialogue than does Islam’s insistence that the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures was deliberately corrupted and required correction from Muhammed." According to Douthat, affinity concerning revelation is more significant than the quarrel about Law.

As a matter of doctrine, I’m more sympathetic to Khan. Although I appreciate efforts to make Jews feel at home in a largely Christian society, we shouldn’t allow politeness to obscure the distance between rabbinical Judaism, which is essentially communal and theonomistic, and the emphasis on personal faith that characterizes many forms of Christianity. But there is a truly Judeo-Christian current of the highest importance for modern life. The political Hebraism that emerged in the 17th century is a major and often unacknowledged source for American principles and institutions.

This is not the right setting for a scholarly account, which I’m anyway ill-equipped to provide. As a general sketch, it’s enough to say that the renewed emphasis on Scripture by the reformers, especially Calvin, encouraged the view that the regime established by the covenant at Sinai remained pleasing to God. This regime, however, was neither a monarchy nor a feudal-style aristocracy. Instead, it appeared to be a kind of democratic republic, constituted by the decision of the whole people to accept to the Mosaic code.

The Biblical priority of republicanism generated a whole new genre of arguments in favor of popular sovereignty and representative government. Traces of these arguments can be found not only in thinkers like Hobbes, Grotius, and Milton, but right into 18th century debates surrounding the American War of Independence and associated attempts at constitution writing. Many such arguments were "secularized" along the way—and in some cases were chosen for their secularizing potential ("paging Benedict Spinoza"). Yet there’s a case to be made that the most meaningful Judeo-Christian synthesis is neither ethical nor theological, but occurs on the level of politics and concerns the relation of the people to its government.

Does anyone out there really believe in “metaphysical neutrality” in the political realm, or, for that matter, in a purely “political” liberalism (later Rawls) that would be neutral with respect to understandings of the meaning of life, or of “the whole”? I can’t believe Damon Linker does (see his quite anodyne, non-committal suggestion linked by Mr. Poulos below - “The Quest for Metaphysical Neutrality”). Can we be rid of this non-starter of an argument once and for all? Is politics not the realm of collective human choice and action? Does not every action aim at some end(s)? Now, can we make sense of any proximate end without taking into account, as best we can, the larger circumstances and interests of the individuals and community whose ends are in question? Hobbes of course suggests we rigorously exclude the question of purpose and just agree that we all want to avoid violent death. But such an agreement obviously involves, not neutrality with respect to ends held by some to be higher than mere life, but a clear and deliberate depreciation of such ends. The same structure of argument repeats itself time and time again in liberal thought, from Locke through Mill to Rawls: what is presented as a non-partisan or “metaphysically neutral” privatization of ends in fact proves to be a privileging of certain ends – certain liberal or liberationist ends – over others.

A perfect little example of the inevitable collapse of the strategy of neutrality is provided (if I may go back a few weeks - actually quite a short lag time for me) in a blog post against Proposition 8 by Andrew Sullivan. Our only hope in a modern, secular, pluralistic society, he argues, is “to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature.” The conflict over issues such as same-sex marriage can be set aside, Sullivan thinks, if only we accept that we live in a “disenchanted polis,” a political community with no substantive moral content. Our public space, he assures us, can be simply legal and procedural, and thus morally neutral.

However, we have only to raise the question “why?” in order to begin to see through this (no doubt completely sincere) protestation of neutrality. Why would such a neutral society be good — perhaps only because it manages to keep the peace among morally incompatible groups? But will this “peace” not be constituted by one or another set of public priorities, and thus one or another dominant vision of a good human life? Mr. Sullivan does not keep us waiting long for a peek at his answer to such a question. Only a few lines after celebrating the new, purely modern, procedural, and disenchanted polis, he yields to a lyrical impulse in expressing his underlying moral vision: “We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment.” Clearly Sullivan’s privatized and neutral public sphere is grounded in a moral ontology that he is comfortable proclaiming as publicly authoritative, an ontology that locates ultimate meaning in the individual creation of meaning, and in the empowerment of the “self” to express its meanings without bounds.

Mr. Sullivan sees no contradiction between his posture of neutrality and his confession of faith in the ultimacy of self-expression, and we would not expect him to. He holds his fundamental moral beliefs so dogmatically that he does not even see that they are anything but neutral.

But the cry immediately arises: we cannot forsake the ideal of neutrality, for then we are left in a war of all against all with no rational standard to which to appeal, abandoned to a cacophony of fanaticisms that can only portend unfettered violence. But, please: this bête noire is conjured precisely to steer us back to some spurious neutrality. (Although we must concede to the founders of liberalism that the wars of religion gave good reason to despair of substantive reasoning.) Liberals are compelled to raise this bogey in order to drive us back to the dream of “neutrality”; with them, it’s always either Rawls or Carl Schmitt, either relativism and utter privatization, or absolutism and the Taliban.

But, if not neutrality, the specious neutralizers ask, then alternative theory is there, what general theory of political justification will guide us? Now try this on for size: there is no such theory. The essential mistake is to demand an a priori general theory of what counts as reasonable in the first place. This is one way of stating the postmodernism of our conservatism: we are not anti-foundationalist in the hypermodern sense (a disguised, radicalized neutrality), but rather postmodern in the authentically political sense: we claim no neutral, a priori “foundation,” but advance our substantive reasons in the political forum to be weighed according to their worth. Bring your reasons, we say, as they address both the political facts on the ground and your best understanding of connections with larger purposes (no a priori exclusion of religious insights, of course, or of arguments from inherited experience), and we’ll bring ours. And then we’ll talk, and we’ll mobilize interests and claims. That’s why they call it politics. And it’s never “neutral.”

Bouncing off the point I make in that last post , I’ll present a conundrum: Why is it that the most humble people I know also tend to be the most violent (sometimes physically, more often intellectually)? Those friends of mine who are most skeptical of dogmatism (especially rationalism, the absolutist’s absolutism), the ones most willing to entertain the other side’s arguments in good faith, are also the ones most disposed to instigate long political brawls by making provocative statements, or get into bar-fights. Why? I would have thought that humility was a virtue of the dispositionally meek or, at the very least, non-confrontational.

Is it because these friends of mine have faith, not in themselves, but in the fight? "I am willing to slug it out with you, not because I am sure I’ll win, but because I’m sure the right man will?" Something to keep in mind when illustrating your own copy of A Field Guide to the Virtues of North America . ]]>Austin Stonehttp://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/01/humility-postscript